]]>Rad Geek's Lazy Linkingtag:projects.radgeek.com,2009:lazy-linking/radgeek2011-06-20T15:00:00+00:000Rad Geekhttp://radgeek.com/tag:radgeek.com,2008://geekery_today.200811130800352008-11-18T23:12:29Z2008-11-13T16:00:35ZIt’s done a lot. We have a lot of prisoners in there totally naked. — Timothy Swanson, Sheriff of Stark County, Ohio.

Trigger warning. The link is to a local news story, which includes a video with short clips from a police video which may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.

For the past several months, Sheriff Tim Swanson has refused all requests for interviews about the Hope Steffey case, claiming that it was inappropriate to comment on the case in the media while it was still being reviewed in court. Of course this was complete bollocks; as he just proved, the real issue was that he had an election coming up in November, and he didn’t want to say anything on teevee that could be used against him, and now that he has been safely re-elected he is happy to wallow around in front of a camera and say any damn thing he pleases about the case. For example, that his gang of hired muscle down at the jail are doing this sort of thing all the time, and it’s not his fault because he can’t ship people down to the local mental ward anymore and that it’s O.K. for his crew to strip down women with men in the room because he just can’t be bothered to figure out how to hire enough women that he won’t be routinely sexually traumatizing women in his jail, for their own good, but, hey, it’s all O.K. for the Stark County Sheriff’s office to be running their own personal Abu Ghraib, because the mixed-gender hired muscle that strips women down in cells and leaves them there naked for hours at a time has a nifty four-letter acronym, which makes it all official and O.K.

There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent, nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.

Trigger warning: The police surveillance video, news story, photos, and text comments from freelance thugs, which this story reports on, may be triggering for past experiences of violence. (Note added 2008-03-18.)

Here is something that I wrote a couple years ago about the State and its efforts to protect the hell out of us all whether we want it to or not:

The State is, as Catharine MacKinnon says, male in the political sense. But not only because the law views women’s civil status through the lens of male supremacy (although it certainly does). It is also because the male-dominated State relates to all of its subjects like a battering husband relates to the household of which he has proclaimed himself the head: by laying a claim to protect those who did not ask for it, and using whatever violence and intimidation may be necessary to terrorize them into submitting to his protection. The State, as the abusive head of the whole nation, assaults the innocent, and turns a blind eye to assaults of the innocent, when it suits political interest — renamed national interest by the self-proclaimed representatives of the nation. It does so not because of the venality or incompetance of a particular ruler, but rather because that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area, as a good German might tell you, and to beat, chain, burn, or kill anyone within or without who might endanger that, whether by defying State rule, or by simply ignoring it and asking to be left alone.

This is how government cops protect you: by beating the shit out of a suspect woman after she’s already been handcuffed, turning off the camera so that they won’t be caught on tape doing it, and then claiming that the reason she ended up lying a pool of her own blood in the middle of the room, with two black eyes, a broken nose, and missing teeth, was that she tried to leave the room and fell and hurt herself in the process. He didn’t do it, and besides, even if he did, she was belligerent (which, since there’s no evidence of her trying to use physical force against the cop at any point, is cop-speak for mouthing off).

She fell.

Please note that the explicit reason for this violent creep handcuffing her, slamming her up against the wall, and then beating the hell out of her was that there are rules you have to follow (where there are is cop-speak for I make, and you have to means or else), which rulesabsolutely require that you keep her in a tiny room no matter what, by any means necessary, and don’t set aside your paperwork for even a moment so that she can call somebody to let them know where she is. No matter how easy it would be for you to do so, and no matter how quickly that would de-escalate an extremely stressful situation.

Please also note that, because Wiley Willis is a cop and his victim, Angela Garbarino, is not, so far the only consequences that this violent sociopath — who had already been named in at least two unrelated brutality complaints in the past two years — is that he was given a paid vacation for three months, and then finally lost his job after an administrative hearing. But in the view of other Shreveport cops, Willis deserves this proverbial walk around the block because After reviewing the evidence, we decided it was something that needed to be handled internally and that it was not enough to pursue criminal charges. Nowadays, thanks to the concerted struggle of our feminist foremothers to reform the police and courts’ handling of violence against women, if any man who didn’t sport a badge and a uniform had been alone in a closed room with a woman who ended up getting hurt so bad she needed to be hospitalized, with a video clearly showing him shoving her around, handcuffing her, slamming her against the wall, and then deliberately turning the tape off up until she ended up bruised and bleeding, that man would be in jail right now on charge of assault and battery. Even without such comprehensive evidence almost any court would long ago have issued a restraining order against the violent pig. I’ll bet that there are a lot of people in Shreveport who wish they could get one of those against Wiley Willis and the paramilitary force that employed him.

In the YouTube comments thread, you can find the usual sado-fascist bully brigade of police enablers, one of whom summarizes the situation as follows:

She was very cooperative when the officer was polite to her and did not yell or demand anything…Yah right! Saying the word Miss and Mam didnt do any good. She decided to get drunk and stupid, not follow directions, would jerk away,and thought she was in charge. When she got arrested she needed to shut her cock-holster! The officer cant make her take the test. All he had to do was state she refused to take the test and be done with it. She got the best of him because now she will get paid.

Another adds:

she’s a woman. act like a lady or get treated like a man. she got much better treatment than a man would even after she kept disobeying

I wasn’t there, nor have I ever been to Abu Ghraib; therefore, I am not qualified to offer expert analysis as to the events that occurred at either. However, I do know that making generalizations about humans placed in a position of power and authority over others is grossly unfair to the many who serve our nation.

… Maybe the handling of Ms. Steffey was not properly conducted; maybe it was. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I do know that Sheriff Swanson has requested outside assistance from the Ohio attorney general’s office in investigating the incident, and I am willing to await its findings before I make judgment.

Should the investigation prove that the deputies involved did abuse their authority, I will then consider them responsible individually. I will not hold every human being in a position of authority, or every deputy in the sheriff’s office, accountable for the actions of a few.

McClelland’s position on the particular case — which he fraudulently passes off as a critical suspension of judgment, when in fact it is nothing more than overt denialism toward obvious abuse captured on film — is objectionable enough by itself. But what’s even more foolish, and extremely dangerous in the long run, is the notion that a tightly-organized class of people, who exercise such a tremendous advantage over the rest of us in both physical force and legal power, ought to be given every benefit of the doubt when they’re accused of hurting people that they willingly chose to put under their legally-backed and heavily-armed power, and that the basic institutional structures which back up their power cannot be called into question without unfair generalization or stereotyping. When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police department almost invariably doing everything in its power to conceal, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless the victim may be, it defies reason to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here. What you have is one of two things: either a professionalized system of control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people, or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

Further reading:

]]>21Rad Geekhttp://radgeek.com/tag:radgeek.com,2007://geekery_today.200708072244152008-02-13T23:13:01Z2007-08-08T03:44:15ZAt Distributed Intelligence 2007-08-06, Andrew Perraut has an interesting post considering the atomic massacre at Hiroshima in light of just war theory. He argues:

I’m not sure how anyone could argue that this was clearly justified, [as claimed elsewhere by Bruce Bartlett] since it seems, rather, prima facie unjust in the absence of strong countervailing reasons to drop the bomb. If the very existence or sovereignty of the United States would have been compromised by not destroying Hiroshima, perhaps that would be enough, but was that the case? And was it the case that only by deliberately targeting the civilian population we could save ourselves? The second questions is the most important, and most defenders of the decision gloss over it, because there isn’t a good answer. If detonating Fat Man over an isolated military installation would have convinced the Japanese government to surrender, Hiroshima looks less like a military/scientific triumph and more like a war crime.

I’d add only that, all things considered, I can’t possibly see how the very existence or sovereignty of the United States is worth a damn compared to the lives of 140,000 innocent people. How many real, individual people could be killed or maimed or otherwise ruined in the name of preserving the lines and colors on a map? If the only way to preserve the United States were the unprovoked, deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then I’d say that the lives of those people are infinitely more important, and the abstract entity known as the United States properly ought to die.

That said, I’d like to turn my attention to the comments. A commenter named Michael says something very odd in his reply:

That’s not to justify it morally. But, looking at the time, World War II was so brutal and bombing was simply the allied answer to Axis atrocities on the ground and at sea. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, as thorough as the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attest to this. It was a different time and the traditional rules of war had been largely thrown out the window (interestingly we still observed proper treatment of POWs even then).

Of course, it wasa different time in 1945. But Hiroshima happened only 62 years ago. This kind of argument might get some kind of grip if we were talking about an event so long ago that it happened in a radically different civilizational context — say, 600 or 6,000 years ago. I would still find it bogus, but I could understand where the arguer was coming from. But we are not even talking about that. We are talking about something that happened within living memory. Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay, is still alive today. Thomas Ferebee, the man who actually dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died only 7 years ago. As of March 2005, Tibbets expressed no remorse over his acts, saying If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I’d do it again. Sure, time is always passing and things are always changing. But just how soon in the past does something have to be for the war apologists of the world to allow plain old straightforward moral evaluation of the act or the people involved in committing it? Are we next going to throw up our hands about My Lai, or Abu Ghraib, or something that happened last Thursday, on the grounds that It was a different time?

Further reading:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

Jus ad bello

Like Judas of old,
you lie and deceive
A world war can be won
you want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge — by his deceptions, and by his cruelties — Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

…

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations’ inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

…

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence.

How can we start a war with Iraq while waging a war against terrorists all over the place?

Would the battlefront be too much to manage?

Might al-Qaida appreciate us going into Iraq?

If we attack Iraq, will we be more vulnerable to terrorists?

It’s too bad those people whom we elected to make decisions about those questions for us (President Bush, Vice President Chaney [sic] and our Republican-controlled Congress) and our nation’s National Security advisers and military leaders don’t include the [Opelika-Auburn News] on every little aspect of their planning. Our smart leaders use intelligence that is gathered by very sophisticated sources in their decision-making process. Disclosure of our secret intelligence and plans (necessarily the answers to your questions) to the liberally biased news media usually gets the people who gave the information on which we based our decisions killed or stops any further disclosure of information to our sources. I believe that our leaders have made a full assessment of those and other questions and the best courses of action have been decided upon for the best interest of our nation. All of us should fall in behind our president and whole-heartedly support him and our committed military personnel now.

…

Saddam needs to disarm now. If he does not, this superpower intends to make him. I personally believe that this conflict will be over more quickly than Desert Storm and with even fewer U.S. casualties.

Jus in bello

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, … do hereby proclaim Sunday, January 20, 2002,
as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon all Americans
to reflect upon the sanctity of human life. Let us recognize the
day with appropriate ceremonies in our homes and places of worship,
rededicate ourselves to compassionate service on behalf of the weak
and defenseless, and reaffirm our commitment to respect the life
and dignity of every human being.

Positives

The consequences of a decision to adhere to what I understood to be your earlier determination that the GPW does not apply to the Taliban include the following:

…

Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).
** That statute, enacted in 1996 prohibits the commission of a war crime by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. War crime for these purposes is defined to include any grave breach of GPW or any violation of common Article 3 thereof (such as outrages against personal dignity). Some of these provisions apply (if the GPW applies) regardless of whether the individual being detained qualifies as a POW. Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty. A determination that the GPW is not applicable to the Taliban would mean that Section 2441 would not apply to actions taken with respect to the Taliban.

And there have not been large numbers of civilian casualties
because the coalition took such great care to protect the lives of
innocent civilians as well as holy sites. … When the dust is
settled in Iraq, military historians will study this war. They’ll
examine the unprecedented combination of power, precision, speed,
flexibility and, I would add also, compassion that was employed.

Q: How many people, Iraqi people, have been killed during the occupation? Do you have a figure or don’t you?

A: … And I gave answers to a Parliamentary Question on this. I
went into it in a great deal of detail. We’ve made use of NGO
estimates, and others, but the last estimate which I gave in answer
to a Parliamentary Question, and I speak from recollection but I’m
happy to have this checked, was about ten thousand.

A spike in fighting with Sunni and Shiite insurgents killed eight
Americans in the Baghdad area on Tuesday and Wednesday, pushing the
count to 1,003. That number includes 1,000 U.S. troops and three
civilians, two working for the U.S. Army and one for the Air Force.
The tally was compiled by The Associated Press based on Pentagon
records and AP reporting from Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited progress on multiple
fronts in the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism and
said U.S. enemies should not underestimate the willingness of the
American people and its coalition allies to suffer casualties in
Iraq and elsewhere.

Depression set in, and Jeff dealt with it by going on heavy
drinking binges. On Christmas Eve, he sat down with Debbie and gave
his first account of being told to shoot two unarmed Iraqi
soldiers.

The way he told the story, Jeff was about five feet away from two
Iraqis — each about his own age — when he was ordered to shoot
them. He said he looked them in their eyes before closing his own,
then pulled the trigger.

He took off two dog tags around his neck, threw them at me and
said, Don’t you understand? Your brother is a murderer,
Debbie said.

A former U.S. Marine staff sergeant testified at a hearing Tuesday that his unit killed at least 30 unarmed civilians in Iraq during the war in 2003 and that Marines routinely shot and killed wounded Iraqis.

Jimmy J. Massey, a 12-year veteran, said he left Iraq in May 2003 after a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress. He said he and his men shot and killed four Iraqis staging a demonstration and a man with his hands up trying to surrender, as well as women and children at roadblocks. Massey said he had complained to his superiors about the killing of innocent civilians, but that nothing was done.

The moves came amid renewed warnings from aid groups that Iraq’s
civilian population was facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Although many of Falluja’s 200,000 to 300,000 residents fled the
city before the assault, between 30,000 and 50,000 are believed to
have remained during the fighting.

The horrific conditions for those who remained in the city have
begun to emerge in the last 24 hours as it became clear that US
military claims of precision targeting of insurgent positions
were false.

According to one Iraqi journalist who left Falluja on Friday, some
of the civilian injuries were caused by the massive firepower
directed on to city neighbourhoods during the battle.

If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge
force, said the journalist, who asked not to be named.

The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had
spoiled and people could not charge their cellphones. Some
people hadn’t prepared well. They didn’t stock up on tinned food.
They didn’t think it would be this bad, he said.

At the main hospital, cut off from the rest of the city, doctors
have reportedly been treating the injured with nothing but
bandages, while the Red Crescent says people have been bleeding to
death for lack of medical attention.

Q: Hi, Mr. Secretary. I’m Sergeant Cramer (ph) from the 502nd
(Transit ?), and I was just curious to know whether or not you’ve
been bombarded with apologetic phonecalls from your critics who had
perceived a doom and gloom scenario.

(Applause; cheers.)

Rumsfeld: My answer’s off the record. (Laughter.) There were a lot
of hand-wringers around, weren’t there? (Laughter; applause.) You
know, during World War II, I think Winston Churchill was talking
about the Battle of Britain, and he said, Never have so many owed
so much to so few. A humorist in Washington the other day sent me
a note paraphrasing that, and he said, Never have so many been so
wrong about so much. (Laughter; applause.)

Jus post bellum

How much do I know
to talk out of turn?
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Thought I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never forgive what you do

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes.

I don’t remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest, Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he didn’t remember the statement either.

The claim made headlines around the world after Blair leveled it in a 55-page white paper presented to the House of Commons in September 2002.

The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about
the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and
they don’t have to worry about their husbands and brothers being
taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those
days are over.

On 19 January 2004, Lieutenant General (LTG) Ricardo S. Sanchez,
Commander, Combined Joint Task Force Seven (CJTF-7) requested that
the Commander, US Central Command, appoint an Investigating Officer
(IO) in the grade of Major General (MG) or above to investigate the
conduct of operations within the 800th Military Police (MP)
Brigade. LTG Sanchez requested an investigation of detention and
internment operations by the Brigade from 1 November 2003 to
present. LTG Sanchez cited recent reports of detainee abuse.

…

I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts: (a) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; (b) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; (c) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; (d) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; (e) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; (f) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; (g) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; (h) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; (i) Writing I am a Rapest (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; (j) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; (k) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; (l) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; (m) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. … These findings are amply supported by written confessions provided by several of the suspects, written statements provided by detainees, and witness statements.

…

Several US Army Soldiers have committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law at Abu Ghraib/BCCF and Camp Bucca, Iraq. Furthermore, key senior leaders in both the 800th MP Brigade and the 205th MI Brigade failed to comply with established regulations, policies, and command directives in preventing detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and at Camp Bucca during the period August 2003 to February 2004.

All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has
removed a source of violence, aggression and instability in the
Middle East. … Who would prefer that Saddam’s torture chambers
still be open? Who would wish that more mass graves were still
being filled? Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their
long-awaited liberation?

It’s very important for people, your listeners, to understand in
our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this
magnitude, we act–and we act in a way where leaders are willing to
discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our
Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. … Iraq was a
unique situation because Saddam Hussein had constantly defied the
world and had threatened his neighbors, had used weapons of mass
destruction, had terrorist ties, had torture chambers …

Good morning. On this day two years ago, we launched Operation
Iraqi Freedom to disarm a brutal regime, free its people, and
defend the world from a grave danger.

Et cognoscetis veritatem

Let me ask you one question.
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
when your death takes its toll
all the money you made
will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I’ll follow your casket
in the pale afternoon
I’ll watch while you’re lowered
down to your death-bed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead